Lafarge

In support of developing and driving their service and sales strategy Lafarge plasterboard, a leading plasterboard manufacturer had to understand more about their market place and customers, specifically this included;

An internal view of LPL’s customers – to reveal what levers Lafarge Plasterboard can utilise to improve the customer desire to stay with LPL through their offer.

An external view to better understand the market customers operate – Ultimately, to identify the key drivers for customers and their relative importance in retaining existing business and attracting new business.

To reveal diagnostic and robust opportunities for improvement across the organisation the business required the following areas investigated and where possible measured in comparison to competitor performance:

• The nature of the relationship with LPL
• The future benefits in working together (or not)
• The issues LPL faces with various customers
• The customers’ key driver requirements (from LPL, and in general) and more specifically, what service offer it expects from LPL and why
• A relative importance to the different offers LPL can give

A qualitative research stage enabled identification of customer needs and were revealed from two market environments, both were found to have common core needs, in terms of relationship, management and product specification and different service related requirements, such as delivery, ordering, billing and problem resolution.

To enable a diagnostic approach of action planning, problem resolution and service proposition design, the quantitative element encorporated our GAP analysis product to measure two critical areas, expectation and perception of service delivery in comparison to direct competition.

As a direct result of this research process Lafarge Plasterboard are developing two different approaches to meet their customer service and delivery needs. This process remains in development and is being trialled across a small sample of customers.